essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Henri is at least good for catching the scent of socio-political turmoil in the air.
This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…
Something Lives Something lives in the crawl spaceAbove my room. A bird? Maybe a rat?Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers.But then there’s a scrabbling overheadAnd the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels.We all have the right to be.And I will not pursue you with…
1. My grandmother was a kitchen singer, an apron wearer who trilled the rs and drew out the tra-la-las in all the old songs while she kneaded bread dough or blanched tomatoes. Some days growing up, I spent more time in her windswept farmhouse outside of town than I did in my own home, my…
Brazil has 27 administrative regions, and we found
The strongest evidence of your ancestry,
In the following 10 regions.
I find the roots of an oak (dead, upturned, twisted)
and am left more disoriented than before.
It had almost been a year. This night, a year ago, was when I had had to come back. The realisation was a rock in my gut that nauseously listed every now and then to the side, keeping me awake. It was the sensation of motion in the deprivation-tank stillness of night that displaced me…
I often fantasise about tipping the cabinet forward until the plastic drawers slide out and spill their contents in a wave of plastic. I tell myself they should be recycled or reused. But in the fantasy it all just spills out and keeps on spilling.
Pérado I. Pérado stretched over its one paved road, the village elongated to avoid the mud of the side streets. Haitians called out Blan! – “White man!” – wanting attention or a cash handout or, failing the former, cash alone. I stopped for lunch at a roadside shack. They had rice and chicken and pikliz…
‘What colour do you feel most connected to?
I was not the first. I knew that when it happened. But you feel like the only one it’s happening to. Because it’s happening to you, and there’s only one you. My father died when I was 23. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in July and died in February the next year. For the…
Neither of them talk much in the morning. Somehow things are more difficult in the early hours. She feels more fragile, more lost, more oppressed by the narrow confines and the lack of light.
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we areand not be questioned. Maya Angelou The box room where I was staying was dark, always dark. The window let in only a sliver of light and the lamp cast a weak pool of yellow over dark-painted…
“China is going to take over our world,” my friend declared. Unlikely to happen! I didn’t say the words aloud, though, for this man’s convictions were delivered with such ferocity that any meaningful debate was impossible. Rumour had it that he believed that every country was doomed to inevitable failure unless it bowed down to…
these are the tears that we cannot shed
as we comment on the beauty of the glen and
how wonderful it must have been to live in such a place.
Wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, the kind of place Don DeLillo once wrote evoked “a sense of replenishment … and fullness of being,” I tread cautiously out of suspicion and respect for the potential “airborne toxic event” that is the coronavirus pandemic. As the world continues to pass milestones of Covid infections, I…
the cake is made of Walthamstow
a dense and glutinous Walthamstow
we are going to make Walthamstow
a Titanic success for Walthamstow
Kentucky governor Happy Chandler once said Kentuckians are always either coming home or thinking about coming home. On the day that tornadoes devastated my home state, I was longing to be home. It was December 11, 2021, and I woke up in a New York City hotel room to the news that tornadoes had ripped…
Through this shared language, seen in the celebration of Shabbat at our round dinner table, we create a “home”, a space of belonging, for a culture that has frequently been forcefully ripped from its physical roots.
I wanted you so much
I started making things up
He studies me for a second before facing the road again, his jaw set. My breath is caught in my throat. I clear it, arranging my thoughts. It was just an outburst, a loss of patience: I am safe.
“We can’t take it all,” her brother had said, tossing memories in a bin bag like kittens for drowning.
Bright rays reflect, shape, shake her portrait on the water skin
and it’s broken, burnt, soon gone.
Get some hens
dig up the garden
sow and plant.
From the yew-dark wool you pulled
over my eyeball,
knit one, maul one,
you made a beam
But Jesus never saved the birds. A bird
has never sinned. They have no need for grace,
salvation, guilt, contrition, holy words,
I walk along the beach; I find a bad thing so beautiful
That now it’s a good thing
But Krakow, why am I in Krakow looking for size eight shoes
following a strolling man with a hand-shaped dent in his hat?
sharp as a thorn.
I held on
to whatever
it had been
at the start of existence,
a stem cell
Time’s gone weird, hasn’t it? Hasn’t time gone weird? I’m really struggling with it at the moment. I don’t know what day it is. I’m not sure whether it’s day. It’s 2023 next year. It’s still March 2020. It’s the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. It’s been Wednesday for months. I’ll be dead…
I am a maze of swinging doors.
Catch me, I’ll fall. Feel my ink.
Lost in the torn pelt of my wounds,
I’ve dabbled in sores and spirits.
Fruit of fungus
feigner of fauna
fusion of puck and protoplasm
pale sun after rain,
shadows come back shyly—
they’ve been washed
‘When All Looks Bleak, Keep Going, for What Else Is There?’ – The Generation of Dogged Persistence The setting: my kitchen in the early evening, lights filtering through the window and the door open onto the hallway. The atmosphere: cheerful but low-key, with a smidgen of excitement at the prospect of letting (reasonably) loose. The…
That cow can’t walk. She’s all lame. I won’t touch her hooves.
Dried for sale, sea stars remind you
that we haven’t seen the Atlantic
breathing heavily along a beach
for a couple of plague-struck years.
For a dusty Central American beach town, San Juan del Sur has a ton of history. The former fishing village once offered passage to Forty-Niners on their way from the US east coast to California. Cornelius Vanderbilt grew his fortune by running a waterborne transit line for that gold rush: faster than overland travel, the…
I told no one. Not my parents, not my older sister, not my little brother. I locked myself in the bathroom while my mother stirred tomato sauce and tasted spaghetti (we did not like al dente).
I stood at the bus stop, waiting for the number 17 into Birmingham city centre. I had been waiting for over 20 minutes, and the queue at the stop had now built up to well over 20 people. I can drive, but car ownership had lost its appeal. I was tired of having to cart…
A sprinkling of much needed rain has fallen overnight, and some of the roses have left broken mosaics of red and yellow petals on Dad’s newly cut lawn. Ideal conditions.
For a while I would obsess over how I could make my London plot look less like itself and more like the one I’d walked through as a child on summer holidays.
Before I became a more adventurous eater in my late twenties, my appreciation for traditional Asian food consisted of the bowls of phở that my friends would seek out when we visited Boston. I was fascinated in particular with how my chef friend Charlie approached his noodles: requesting his steak served raw on a side…
goat cheese cannoli with garden gem tomatoes & a floral salad
a hot croquette with apple compote, pumpernickel, & sherbet
blackberry compote on a throne of chocolate mousse
a slice of seasonal pumpkin spice cake
all go to waste
When I was little, the dark staircase between the front and back rooms of my grandparents’ two-up, two-down terrace house had been a mountain. Each step a jagged, granite foothold; the shadowed landing a dark cloud hiding a kingdom of giants, or a castle encased in twisted branches. Their bedroom glowed yellow; the edges of…
Porridge 